Gates: I find the political hijacking of my memoirs rather disappointing

posted at 10:41 am on January 13, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Really? Matt Lauer calls out Robert Gates over his attempt to downplay his criticisms of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and especially Joe Biden in his new memoirs, My Duty. Gates pronounced himself “disappointed” that people seized on quotes from the book for political purposes, but Lauer isn’t buying it:

In an interview on NBC News’s “Today” show, host Matt Lauer asked if Gates has been surprised by the backlash to the book since excerpts were released last week.

“Not really surprised, but in a way disappointed that the book has sort of been hijacked by people along the political spectrum to serve their own purposes, taking quotes out of context…it’s part of the political warfare in Washington that I decry in the book,” he said in the live interview. …

He was seen wearing a neck brace after injuring his first vertebrae in a fall in his home recently.

Gates writes in his memoir Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War that President Obama doubted his strategy in Afghanistan. He also slammed Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy positions and praised former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The news media, Gates said, lost sight of the fact that he “actually agreed virtually on every decision President Obama made on Afghanistan.” He writes in his book that Obama questioned the war’s surge.

Last week, I warned against getting too far ahead of the story with the selected excerpts, and predicted that the context in the book would probably water them down. That’s essentially what Gates says here, too, except with an added patina of false shock. After all, Gates has been around long enough to know that including those anecdotes in his book would (a) attract immediate attention, and (b) sell lots of books. To sit in interviews and act surprised that a political book telling political anecdotes would get used in politics is … amusing, to say the very least.

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I find Secretary Gates’ deliberate decision to delay releasing the book until after the election so the People would have less information about the kind of man they were voting for “rather disappointing.”

Rove’s approving comment that the delay shows the man’s character is not so much disappointing as hilarious.

To sit in interviews and act surprised that a political book telling political anecdotes would get used in politics is … amusing, to say the very least.

I don’t care what Gates says on balance. If the lazy stupid rat-eared bastard wasn’t personally committed to the surge then he had no right ordering troops into harm’s way. Three in four combat deaths in Afghanistan has been under Obama and utterly meaningless because Obama never had any intention cutting and running at the very first political opportunity. More shameful than LBJ and troop casualties in Vietnam.

If one fundamentally believes a person in power, for whom they work, is unprincipled or immoral in some way they have a choice. That is, to either participate as a collaborator or immediately depart and espouse principled opposition to that persons alleged misdeeds.

Notice I didn’t include supporting the charade and leaving at an opportune time to somehow profit from the travesty.

Anyone catch his interview on CBS Sunday Morning? The “reporter” actually interviewed Gates a second time simply to grill him over whether or not his criticisms of President Precious were “fair”. Note that she asked him this sort of thing in the formal sit-down, but apparently she and/or her superiors didn’t think they had adequately defended Obama enough so they chose to badger Gates a second time. And that’s all it was…she sat there repeatedly questioning whether it was a good idea to criticize Obama now. It was textbook Democrat media bias.

All the media needs to know is that Obama was really stoked about getting rid of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. Because a gay solider having anxiety over his sexual orientation is way more important than actual combat.

I am also among those disappointed that Gates waited to publish this book until after Obama was re-elected. He COULD have done the nation if not the world a big, big assist if he’d spilled his beans prior to this.

Anyway, all things considered, I also do recognize whatever conditions may, if not certainly, exist as to national security, world conditions, that inspired Gates to wait to publish now. We the public will never really know what was transpiring that delayed this expose…

It gets worst. There is a nasty rumor out there that our best hope for the next President is a lady named Clinton who just completed a four-year tax payer funded vacation or a heavy set guy form NJ who hates guns, loves muslims and enjoys long walks on the beach with his BFF, Barack.

I will say it again. If the stuff gates states in his memoirs really occurred, then why didn’t he go public about it or report it to the appropriate oversight committees when they occurred. Why did he let us get saddled with these not for one term, but two terms?Gates was derelict in his duty to the America people.

I watched center left Brit Hume on Media buzz, a God awful show on FNC with the odious Howie Kurtz, Sunday and Hume opined that Gates was wrong in revealing how Obama spoke and felt about such important issues as the war effort and national security! When does Hume think the public should get to know what the hell is going on? He said that future presidents will be reluctant to ask for advice if they think that that person might write a tell all book. WTF? EVERY president has had a tell all book written about their administration. Hume sucks big time and has been in DC too long.